Bad news for businesses in their ongoing efforts to optimize their websites for search traffic: for the first-time ever, more than half of search queries on Google result in no clicks to sites. According to marketing analytics firm Jumpshot, most people who search for content from Google find what they want from the search engine results page and don’t bother to click through to a website for more information. What happens on Google stays on Google.
In addition, per Jumpshot, Google continues to send “a huge portion of search clicks to their own properties . . . Those properties include YouTube, Maps, Android, Google’s blog, subdomains of Google.com, and a dozen or so others.”
Why the Rise in Zero-Click Searches?
Why the rise in zero-click searches? Because more than ever, Google is doing its job serving up essential information in response to queries. Over the years, Google has made it possible for business owners to build out rich, informative Google My Business (GMB) pages with information ranging from offers to customer/ratings reviews. Those pages form the foundation for businesses to be found on Google properties such as Google Maps.
GMB pages have become so useful and informative that people are finding what they want (“Find a grocery store near me”) in the knowledge panel of a business without needing to go to a business’s website. In fact, a company’s GMB page is now the single-most important way to attract local search traffic, according to Moz.
Meanwhile it’s no surprise that Google sends a huge proportion of clicks to its own sites. Facing rising competition from Amazon Advertising, Google is under pressure to keep its advertising business strong. To do so, Google needs to keep eyeballs on Google properties, where users are exposed to Google advertising (in May, we noted on our blog that Google is expanding its ad business on Google Maps, to name just one example).
What Advertisers Should Do about Zero-Click Searches
So what should advertisers do? You should:
- Build up your GMB page. If organic queries are increasingly going to your GMB and staying there, then make sure you’ve optimized your GMB content – including images, customer ratings/reviews, and location data – to be found.
- Link your GMB account to your Google Ads account. As Google discusses in this tutorial, linking your GMB account to your Google Ads account makes it possible for your ads to appear with location extensions, which encourage customers to visit your storefront. Through location extensions, customers can see your ads with location information such as your address. And then they can get more information about your location by clicking on location extensions.
- Make sure you’re capitalizing on Google ad products throughout the Google ecosystem. With Google keeping more searchers on Google and its properties, it behooves advertisers to capitalize on where that search activity is occurring.
In addition, Jumpshot’s Rand Fishkin suggests that advertisers seek out keywords whose results have higher click-through rate (CTR) opportunity. He told Search Engine Land, “I think paid search CTR will probably decline over the next few months. That’s because historically, each time Google changes how paid ads appear in the search results (like the late May shift to the black ‘Ad’ labels in mobile SERPs), ad CTR rises, then slowly declines as more searchers get familiar with the ad format and develop ad blindness.”
At the same time, I would be surprised if Google were to leave itself vulnerable to the risk that searchers won’t click on ads.
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